geraineon: (Default)
[personal profile] geraineon posting in [community profile] cnovels
Time for free for all Friday, a day for random chit-chat!

Do you want to talk about the other novels you are reading or find a read-along partner? Practice your Chinese? Request for fics? Ask for beta readers? Just talk about your day?

Go right ahead!

... Since I completely forgot the Read-in-Progress post this week, this doubles as a Read-in-Progress too if you wish!

Date: 2025-07-18 05:08 pm (UTC)
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] aurumcalendula
Ooh one of my libraries has Goodbye My Princess too (four weeks wait for me)! I'm not sure if I'm up for the angst, though.
Edited (typo) Date: 2025-07-19 01:11 am (UTC)

Date: 2025-07-18 06:19 pm (UTC)
anne: (Default)
From: [personal profile] anne
I'm excited, but also: Simon and Schuster put it into their Young Readers imprint! What were they thinking? (but as I said elseweb...it can't be more traumatic than Flowers in the Attic.)

Date: 2025-07-19 09:58 pm (UTC)
forestofglory: Cup of tea on a pile of books (books)
From: [personal profile] forestofglory
Oh I have heard good things about The Raven Stratagem -- and the blurb totally sounds like a cdrama too me. So I hope you enjoy it!

Date: 2025-07-20 08:15 am (UTC)
halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
From: [personal profile] halfcactus
Looking forward to your thoughts about Goodbye My Princess (the book and translation)! And Lord of Mysteries, whichever you get around reading first. And Raven Stratagem. All of the books, lol.

Date: 2025-07-18 04:08 pm (UTC)
larryhammer: Yotsuba Koiwai running, label: "enjoy everything" (enjoy everything)
From: [personal profile] larryhammer
I’ve been traveling, so this read-in-progress covers a few weeks.

First was Apocalypse Lord, a lit-RPG adventure (of the isekai’d-into-a-video-game variety) with a female MC. Spoiler: She succeeds because a) she took part in the game’s closed beta, b) she’s a tank who dumps all points into stamina/HP, and c) as one character eventually realizes, while everyone else treats this as a monster-killing survival game, she instead is playing a resource-management sim ftw. Not great, but not time wasted. Length: about 40% of Journey to the West.

Next was the opening 30 chapters of Seeking Immortality in Vain, and I a) really liked it and b) really hated that I started it despite knowing it’s in progress. I hate reading unfinished stories, haaaaaaate it. (Yes, there are more chapters up now, but I’m not touching them till we get closure, dammit.)

Then while traveling, I returned to Gourmet of Another World, a long-ass comedy xianxia, over 7 times the length of Journey to the West. I was about 60% through, mumble-mumble months ago, when I got derailed onto something else. So while passing time in planes, trains, and hostels, I gobbled down a couple hundred chapters, putting me to 74% through per my ereader (almost a full Journey West of text). That “gobbled” is deliberate: the MC is a culinary cultivator, and the first half of the story, most battles are martial arts cooking competitions — eventually the MC levels up enough to cook combat food. (It is extra humiliating to a cultivator to be defeated in combat by an explosive meatball.) Very fun, and funny.

And I’ve just started The Dragon by Taiyang Jun (don’t know why the author’s name 太阳菌 gets romanized as Tai Yangjun—太阳 is sunlight, and 菌 is mushroom) (also, the original title is 见龙, "meeting the dragon"), a baihe xianxia that looks promising.
Edited ((also)) Date: 2025-07-18 04:52 pm (UTC)

Date: 2025-07-18 04:55 pm (UTC)
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] aurumcalendula
I initally put off starting Seeking Immortality in Vain for the same reason. It looks the webnovel was completed a couple days ago, so I aleast now know what the total chapter count is.

Gourmet of Another World sounds fun!

I really want to check out The Dragon at some point, but annoyingly I think the only translation is MTL.

Date: 2025-07-18 04:59 pm (UTC)
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
From: [personal profile] larryhammer
This translation has every hallmark of being human and not machine translated -- and is well-edited as well.

Date: 2025-07-18 05:13 pm (UTC)
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] aurumcalendula
According to their About Us page: DragonTL is a group that shares fan translated web novels for fans to read, relying on several AI tools for translation.

Date: 2025-07-18 06:21 pm (UTC)
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
From: [personal profile] larryhammer

Ah — missed that. The editing is good enough I couldn’t tell.

Date: 2025-07-19 01:46 am (UTC)
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] aurumcalendula
No worries!

Date: 2025-07-23 06:38 pm (UTC)
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
From: [personal profile] larryhammer

Pretty much! Only with xianxia power-leveling.

Date: 2025-07-24 02:12 pm (UTC)
anne: (Default)
From: [personal profile] anne
I'm just about to finish Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, so Apocalypse Lord sounds good! Thanks for the tip!

Date: 2025-07-24 02:48 pm (UTC)
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
From: [personal profile] larryhammer

They're very aligned, though Apocalypse Lord has a lighter tone (despite its extreme casualty rates, almost as high as Dungeon Crawler Carl).

Date: 2025-07-24 04:55 pm (UTC)
anne: (Default)
From: [personal profile] anne
oh good to know

Date: 2025-07-18 04:35 pm (UTC)
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
From: [personal profile] aurumcalendula
Cnovel-wise, I caught up on Dragon Subjugation Incantation and To Embers We Return!

In the first: Highlight for spoilers! *I liked finding out a bit more of original!Lup Qingci’s history (and why she spared Ruan Li originally)! I also loved Ruan Li realizing what Luo Qingci has done for her sake! Ruan Li thinking about how Luo Qingci can’t take her reverse scale because she’s already given it to Chi Qing both kinda amused me and makes me a bit apprehensive of Ruan Li's reaction if/when she discovers Chi Qing isLuo Qingci.*.

In the second: Highlight for spoilers! *Politcal plotting coninues (involing a false Jiang Mingyou) and ir tooks like Song Juguang and Jiang Changbai might have a conversation about the latter avoiding the former.*.

w/r/t non-cnovel stuff, I'm rereading The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones. It's a fantasy novel (with a side of  f/f romance) set in an early 19th century era Ruitanian-ish country. imho this is faster paced than the first in the series and I'm enjoying Antuniet as a protagonist.

Date: 2025-07-18 05:00 pm (UTC)
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
From: [personal profile] larryhammer
I didn't like The Mystic Marriage quite as much as the first book, but it was indeed quite good. Antuniet was great.

Date: 2025-07-18 06:21 pm (UTC)
anne: (Default)
From: [personal profile] anne
I did a very silly Nirvana in Fire fanwork yesterday: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67708406

Date: 2025-07-19 12:49 pm (UTC)
duckprintspress: (Default)
From: [personal profile] duckprintspress
I'll post my read in progress cause it's c-novel! I'm reading Lip and Sword by Jin Shisi Chai. All in all, the toxic yaoi is way less toxic than I'd been led to believe. Like, it's not... not toxic... but compared to some toxic yaoi I've read these two are positively wholesome. Like, basically everything has been consensual (not safe, sane and consensual and not pre-negotiated, but consensual) and both of them are consistently into it. The reviews I saw that complained about how awful these characters are truly are toxic yaoi weaklings.

Date: 2025-07-23 04:39 pm (UTC)
duckprintspress: (Default)
From: [personal profile] duckprintspress
seriously wondering the same.

Date: 2025-07-20 08:12 am (UTC)
halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
From: [personal profile] halfcactus
I did some Chinese studying (after... 5 years of not studying...) and posted pics of my notebook here! #Road to HSK4 lol

Otherwise I've mostly been (re)reading poetry—Andrea Gibson's in honor of their passing, and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta whose collection I've been going through since... May.

Date: 2025-07-20 11:49 am (UTC)
lee_bella: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lee_bella
Finished The Reviled God of Cooking Tries to Slack Off (万人嫌厨神试图摆烂 / 卷王躺平后变万人迷了) by Su Huai Huang (苏怀荒) a while ago. It's a career-oriented, crematorium story about an overworked ex-master chef returning to the past and changing his lifestyle for the better. Inevitably he's gradually drawn back to the food industry. Very heavy on the food industry main plot and very well researched.

Currently reading I Made the Top Star (我捧红了顶级流量[穿书]), also by Su Huai Huang. This one is a "transmigrated into a bleak, depressing entertainment industry novel" from the perspective of a top-tier talent agent-turned cannon fodder. The love interest is the actual main character of the say novel, but the MC doesn't know that.

Date: 2025-07-23 05:04 pm (UTC)
lee_bella: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lee_bella
No, I don't think either of them has audio drama.

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